Absolute minimum game

[rgh]

What would be the absolute minimum 'game' that could be used to create a world and 'play'? The 'hello world' of minetest games, merely to demonstrate that the engine does something.

The minimal development test game still has a lot of things in it. Clouds, blocks of earth with grass on top, rocks, several things already in player inventory and a generated landscape. Plus, I think, day & night.

I'm wanting to distinguish which of these elements are always provided by the engine and which are provided by lua code.

Depending on how much of what the player experiences is due to lua mods, I'm wondering if it's possible to make a game that looks and feels nothing like minetest_game?

[Thermal_Shock]

If you use the singlenode mapgen then I don't think there's anything that's a locked in requirement. Even pulling the cloud texture doesn't throw any errors, it just results in darker clouds. You just need your GUI stuff like hearts and bubbles.

If you're using a mapgen like v7 then some stuff needs to be registered with the mapgen. Stone, water source, and water river source are all that's needed. It doesn't matter what the blocks are. If I remember right you could just register air for the water blocks if you felt like it.

The mapgen v6 is older and is a lot less flexible. With v6 you also need to register a ton of other things like dirt, grass, trees, leaves, apples, sand, gravel, snow, ice, plus a bunch of other stuff. The full list is found in the lua_api under Aliases needed for Mapgen v6. Again you could just register whatever blocks you felt like. The v6 mapgen doesn't support biomes either.

You need something specified as a tool in order to interact with the nodes. Just setting up the hand to interact with all of your node groups would be the simplest way.

The skybox and day/night are the default provided by the engine, they can however be tinkered with a little through set_sky and override_day_night_ratio. I haven't played around with it much myself.

I've been toying around with a game that just uses the hand as your tool, the water blocks, and basic coloured blocks. I've been leaning towards merging it into that odd little Build Your World game I haven't done anything with in forever. It pretty much meets the criteria of the absolute bare bones of what you need in a game.

[rgh]

Thanks Thermal_Shock, I'd be interested to see your game, the more minimal the better!

I was thinking of an endless universe of one type of block, with the player starting out in a say 10x10x10 space, in the middle of that infinite expanse of blocks.

No sky, no clouds, no vegetation. No fantastic generated landscape. Nothing except one type of block that the player can mine.

Maybe that's not possible.

[Wuzzy]

That would probably be an empty subgame. :D

viewtopic.php?t=11164

[paramat]

I was thinking of an endless universe of one type of block, with the player starting out in a say 10x10x10 space, in the middle of that infinite expanse of blocks.
No sky, no clouds, no vegetation. No fantastic generated landscape. Nothing except one type of block that the player can mine.

Possible, 'singlenode' mapgen means it can be a uniform mass of a single node, normally "air", but the node can be anything, use a mod with:

Code: Select all

minetest.register_alias("mapgen_singlenode", "<nodename>")

[rgh]

That would probably be an empty subgame. :D

viewtopic.php?t=11164

Thanks Wuzzy, that's what I'm looking for. I'll experiment with it.

[paramat]

Minimum mapgen aliases to support all mapgens are explained here https://github.com/minetest/minetest/bl ... i.txt#L242

[rgh]

Possible, 'singlenode' mapgen means it can be a uniform mass of a single node, normally "air", but the node can be anything, use a mod with:

Code: Select all

minetest.register_alias("mapgen_singlenode", "<nodename>")

Thanks, I'll try it.